The Honours Programme is taught in English and comprises 30 extra EC to be obtained in your second and third year. You will earn 12 or 18 points by carrying out a research project at the Faculty of Humanities. The remaining points can be obtained by following interfaculty honours courses.
The programme allows you to broaden and deepen your knowledge and skills, and offers a wide range of subjects.
Research Projects
Honours students at the Faculty of Humanities are trained to become creative, critical and versatile researchers. The faculty honours component consists of a 12 EC research project. This will give you a unique opportunity to look behind the scenes of Humanities research, to develop new skills, to contribute to the creation of new knowledge, and it will prepare you for your BA thesis. You will be directly involved with ongoing research, collaborate with excellent VU researchers and tutors, and meet other motivated and talented students.
Available projects differ from year to year, and typically cover a wide range of topics. You can either choose a project within your discipline or try something new. The projects will allow you to develop a variety of competences, including analytical, presentation, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. This is a list of research projects that were made available to Honours students at the Faculty of Humanities during the academic years 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, offering a glimpse into the opportunities for exploration and study:
Department of Art & Culture, History, and Antiquity
- “Connections to slavery of Hope & Co. and Mees en Zoonen” and “Land grabbing empires: Envisioning dispossession in early-modern pamphlets” (prof. dr. Pepijn Brandon)
- “DEXTER-DC: Digital Environment for eXtensible annoTation of Electronic Research Data Collections” (dr. Norah Karrouche)
- “History and heritage of Smell” (prof. dr. Inger Leemans)
- “How have gender studies been implemented when writing design history?” (dr. Javier Gimeno Martínez)
- “International migration and mobility from modern China” (prof. dr. Pál Nyiri)
- “Inventarisatie van de waterkelders van de Nederlandse hofjes (1500-1900) in het kader van Coping for Drought” (prof. dr. Petra van Dam)
- “Mapping the impact of the social field on the transition to the Low Carbon Society” and “Who are the neighbors of Sapiens?” (dr. Sjoerd Kluiving)
- “Nations and Emotions. How storytelling and commemorating pasts conflicts are used for political violence and militarization” (dr. Younes Saramifar)
- “Pressing Matter” (prof. dr. Katja Kwastek & Quincy Gario)
- “Romeinse wegen in Nederland” (dr. Philip Verhagen)
- “The Limits of Internationalism: Socialist Parties and Immigrant Workers” (dr. Lucas Poy)
Department of Language, Literature and Communication
- “Automated Word Order Correction for L2 Learners of Dutch” (dr. Lisa Beinborn & Camille Welie)
- “Burning Lowlands: Reconsidering the Wildland-Urban Interface” (dr. Linde Egberts & dr. Niels van Manen)
- “Content analysis in the domains of social media, advertising, or news” (dr. Luuk Lagerwerf)
- “Just Do It? Het cultiveren van nieuwsgewoonten onder jongeren” (dr. Tim Groot Kormelink)
- “Multilingualism, Translanguaging, and Code-Switching (Linguistics and Literature)” (prof. dr. Diederik Oostdijk, dr. Petra Bos, and dr. Laura Rupp)
- “What language support do students in an English-taught programme want and need?” (dr. Gea Dreschler & Abby Gambrel)
- “Woord en beeld in achttiende-eeuwse trompe-l’oeilboekjes” (dr. Nelleke Moser)
Department of Philosophy
- “Co-creating a tool to assess the epistemic responsibilities of universities (dr. Jeroen de Ridder & Iris Lechner)
- “Digital history of philosophy” (prof. dr. Marije Martijn)
- “Reverse engineering the canon” (dr. Carlo Ierna)
- “The ethics of non-pharmacological interventions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic” (dr. Justin Bernstein)
- “Translating Bantu Philosophy” (dr. Angela Roothaan)
Optionally, you can do a second 6 EC research project in consultation with a researcher and the Honours Programme coordinator.
Registration and contact
Are you interested in applying to the Honours Programme? Please carefully read the instructions and requirements. Mind the important deadlines!
More information about the programme can be found on the VU Honours Programme webpage. You can also contact the coordinator for the Faculty of Humanities, dr. Lucas Poy.